A ping flashed my radar.
$8.74 fare.
4.3 mile trip.
Pickup 1.2 miles away.
My finger clicked accept without hesitation. It was apparent to a math flunky that the fare would come in at over $1 a mile, and the Ants were out tonight. I’d already calculated it at $1.59 a mile, but we just met, and I don’t want to come across cocky. I eased into the pickup for rider, Margot, 3.9 stars, the extra “T” no doubt responsible for her deflated rating. She made me wait four minutes before sliding into my car.
“Fastest route or fewest turns?” I asked, searching for her eyes in the rearview mirror. Margot with a “T” responded with a pop of her Bubble-Yum.
There’s no training to be an Uber Ant, so you learn through what doesn’t work. If you’re a ridesharer already headed that direction and want a little pocket change, any fare will do. If you need to worry about paying bills, you gotta be choosy. Short trips are king. You need to make $1 a mile to break even. That includes deadheading so you better have math skills or develop them quick. If a long fare drops you in the middle of nowhere, the empty ride back factors into your calculation. Airports are the kiss of death. Uber artificially deflates airport fares based on the belief that travelers are well-to-do and more likely-to-tip, an assumption I have found-to-be-bullshit.
I pulled over at Margot’s drop off. “A little further,” she demanded in between smacks of gum.
“You need to change the destination in the app.”
“Yeah no idea how to do that. It’s just like a mile, bro.” Margot met my eyes in the rearview mirror, “What, you want a one-star rating?” You could get an Ant to light himself on fire under threat of a one-star. Not only do ratings influence a pax’s willingness to get into a stranger’s car, but Uber also uses them to determine who gets pinged with the plum fares.
Four unpaid miles later, Margot with a “T” exited my CR-V with a slam, nose buried in her phone as she clicked her way up the footpath to her Ayn Rand book club. Ding!
REVIEW RECEIVED: 1 Star
Ho.
It should’ve tickled me when Margot tripped and starfished onto the lawn hard enough to knock the “T” off her name. But instead, I felt my teeth clenching, a low rumble building in my head louder and louder and louder until the car seemed to vibrate around me—
Ding!
Pickup request from Misfits Pub. Jimmy. Likely drunk. Nearly out of gas and patience, I declined. I calculated my timing belt had 250 miles left in it, and I needed a repair before it broke. Preventative maintenance was best in people and cars. It was time to fill up and call it a night. I pulled into Arco. $4.78 for regular, fuck me into the sun.
I first knew I was good with numbers in 7th grade statistics. I never raised my hand; it was much worse than that. Mr. Maliborski would cold call me when the class was stumped. Always having the correct answer made me radioactive to girls, so I offered the wrong one 20% of the time. Only Emma noticed. I had some sort of eye flutter when I lied. Emma was perfect in every way imaginable, and I dutifully avoided her.
I forgot to switch off my app and got another ping at the gas pump. Jimmy. Same dude, probably stranded. To this day, I don’t know why I clicked accept. I wonder how differently things might’ve turned out if I hadn’t. But there I was, .13 of a mile from pickup when I heard the timing belt give out. That wasn’t even the bad part.
The pax loaded into my backseat without a sound. No words, no butt sliding across faux leather, no belt click. Just silence. No, not silence. A void.
“Quickest route or fewest turns?” I asked. Instead of searching the rearview for my pax’s eyes like I always did, I turned around. My eyes globed.
I was looking at myself.
I slid into bed, careful not to disturb my wife. She had an exam tomorrow morning, and any disturbance might be responsible for a few percentage points. As I Cirque du Soleiled my body under the sheets, she turned and smiled.
“I’m pregnant.”
I beamed at Emma, the girl from statistics class. Didn’t think I’d get up the guts to talk to her, did ya? When Emma was a kid, she used to tackle 8,000 piece puzzles in front of the TGIF lineup every Friday night. But her most famous trick was solving a Rubik’s cube in under a minute. Her record was forty-three seconds which she achieved in front of the cafeteria as we scarfed on rectangular pizza slices. She’d graduated from puzzles to people, and I was her 1,000,000 piece challenge.
We’d been unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant for years. I cited cost for refusing medical help, but it was more a fear of a doctor challenging my already-diminished manhood. I argued it just took longer in our late-thirties. Teenagers got pregnancies they didn’t want at the flip of an erection, and we put our careers in front of building families and then wonder why we can’t get pregnant. Not that I had a career beyond Uber. I set all that aside to support Emma’s dream of returning to school to become a therapist.
As we laid in bed, staring into each other’s eyes, I felt a tickle on my hand. I raised my finger to a ladybug tottering over my thumb. A sign of good luck. It was the happiest moment of my life.
Fuck this motherfuck piece of donkey shit.
I was no mechanic, and staring at the engine of my car that refused to start merely confirmed. Despite my eleven-minute YouTube education, I still wasn’t able to repair my timing belt.
“Car trouble?” our neighbor, Ted, observed astutely from his lawn.
“Yeah, Ted,” I tossed back with the minimum threshold of sarcasm required by law. Ted was an actor who drove Uber parttime to make ends meet – not an Ant lifer like me – so we compared notes occasionally. Everything was a performance with Ted. He watered his flowers with panache, combing his hands through his hair careful to let me know about his green thumb and ability to grow bangs.
I had my car towed into G&D Automotive, run by Gustavo who I’d gotten to know over the years. Ants know their mechanics. As Gustavo wrestled with the timing belt, I sat in a waiting room spotted by grease and termite droppings. Local news ran on the tube television on the desk. Here’s the thing, it wasn’t so much the grotesque details of the murder being reported that grabbed my attention, though it probably should’ve been. A beheading was news even in L.A. where even the criminals try to one-up each other. And it certainly wasn’t the victim’s name. Margot Truscott didn’t ring a bell. What chilled my bones was the headshot –
It looked a lot like Margot with a “T.”
“$476.53!” Gustavo shouted from behind, neglecting to monitor me for heart failure. I handed over my Discover Card (shut up) and held my breath as he swiped. Gustavo shook his head at the “Declined” message. I’d already started running through options in my head – ask my estranged father for a loan, fall sobbing at Gustavo’s feet, hang myself from a ceiling fan – when an Uber message dinged my cell:
Tip Added from Jimmy
$476.53
The back of my neck suddenly grew warm and humid. I felt pulsating breaths against my skin. There was a presence behind me, and I wasn’t sure it was human.
When I spun around, no one was there.
I scrubbed past footage of my backseat from the previous night’s rides. There was the pukey girl, the guy on MDMA that turned my CR-V into an EDM rave, Margot with a “T.” Margot was almost certainly the girl from the news report, but she wasn’t who I was looking for. There! I hit play, and there he was. There I was? Jimmy seemed to resemble me, but it was hard to tell. He was partially hidden in shad—
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING???” I’m sure Emma didn’t all-caps yell, but it felt like it. She peered over my shoulder at my computer screen. I asked her, “Do you notice anything…odd about this pax?”
“Pax?”
“Passenger.”
“I swear you guys speak a different language.”
She didn’t mean anything by it, but the “you guys” really got in my feelings. I started driving to make a few bucks on the side when she went back to school. Now I was a “you guys” with ambition nowhere in sight.
Emma leaned into the screen. “He’s hiding in the shadows.” She didn’t mean it to be terrifying, I don’t think. Then, a street lamp draped the pax’s face in a yellow hue.
“See! He looks just like me!” I exclaimed.
She bolted out of the room. From the sounds emanating from the bathroom, it didn’t seem she was running from the footage. Morning sickness called, and cleanup was needed on aisle seven. I scrubbed the last of several stray pieces of vomit plastered to the outside of the toilet bowl when the doorbell rang, leading me to wonder if anyone other than axe murderers make house calls.
“Uh—oh—hello, officer,” I stammered from behind my Walter White smock and goggles.
“James Wiggins?” Officer Smerconish inquired. “I need to ask you some questions.”
“Uh. Okay.”
“At the station.”
“Honey, who is it?” Emma yelled from the bedroom. I was thankful she couldn’t see my eyes flutter as I returned some excuse about running an errand.
I suppose it was a kindness that Smerconish didn’t force me to ride in the backseat of the cruiser, but it was clear that’s where he thought I belonged. At the precinct, he locked me in a shoebox of an interrogation room and let me sweat it out like an old pair of Nikes. The red dot of the security camera studied me like its prey on the open savannah, preparing to eviscerate my meats. When Smerconish finally came in, I was ready to confess to JFK and Epstein.
“What’s your occupation?”
“Uber—I drive,” I responded flawlessly.
“Not Lyft?”
“I don’t…uh…don’t like pink,” I said, not wanting to get into the lifetime ban issued after a false user complaint last year.
“Did you give a…” Smerconish checked his notes, “…a Margot Truscott a ride three nights ago?”
“We don’t get last names—”
He flashed a photo of Margot with a “T,” may she rest in peace or at least starfished on a lawn.
“Are you aware she was murdered the night you gave her a ride?”
“No that’s uh—terrible—”
“We believe you were the last person to see her alive.” Smerconish scraped his metal chair closer, a move he’d perfected. “We have evidence tying you to the scene of the murder.”
Poker paid my tuition at Santa Monica Community College. It was the perfect combination of my strength—numbers—and my weakness—people. I got better at the second part after learning the fundamental truth about poker: who you are at the felt is who you are in life. If you’re an aggressive bluffer trying to shove the table around no matter the hole cards, I’d wager ten to one you’re a bloviating asshole to the waiter, too. I lost my love for the game, but not before I learned how to disassociate. An opponent couldn’t read me if I was detached from the cards I was holding. I was physically at the felt, but mentally? Cabo. Criminals made for great poker players and vice versa. This was my first police interrogation, but I’d already withdrawn far behind my eyes, present in front of Smerconish in technicality only.
HONNNNNKKKKKK!
I jerked the CR-V back into my lane as a pickup truck raced by. My eyes adjusted from blaring headlights to dark road. “Watch where you’re going, chief,” a businessman in a Brooks Brothers suit hollered from my backseat. I was just shocked to discover I was diving. I didn’t remember getting into the car. What time was it anyway? Jesus, 3:23am.
God only knows what I’d told Smerconish.
Weeks passed, and Emma grew more pregnant as pregnant women do. Here’s what you missed on this season of Uber Fucked My Life:
A slurry dude named Dodge sporting a handlebar mustache and a “No Fear” T-shirt piled into my Uber screaming at me to take him to some bar. It was the bar he’d just stumbled out of.
I was struggling to get to a pickup point because of an accident. It turned out that one of the drivers in the accident was my pax, and he was Ubering to the hospital to avoid an ambulance charge.
A bachelorette party put their passed-out bride into my backseat to continue partying without her. The bride spelled her name Taylyr like vowels came at a premium. When she woke, she jumped out of my car screaming she’d been kidnapped.
I hadn’t heard from Smerconish. I contemplated calling the precinct to see if I was still a murder suspect, but that seemed a bit like the kid who reminded Mr. Maliborski at the end of statistics class that he’d forgotten to assign homework. It was me, I did that.
$3.13 fare. 3.6 mile trip.
I clicked accept without calculation. Uber was squeezing us with a new fare structure that went like this: ping a specific driver with a lowball offer. After he declined, the fare was put out to bid where the rest of the Ants had seconds to decide whether to accept a lower fee in a race to the bottom. It was pretty neat and cool and I had no notes.
It was raining hard now, and I was driving 14-hour days. Emma was 16-weeks pregnant and we didn’t have health insurance and America and stuff. I’d even been doing airport rides (hot tip: they don’t tip). The only fare I declined was a hospital ride. Hospitals didn’t have the resources to provide all their discharges with rides home, so they took to booking UberXL. Inevitably when you got your pax to drop off, they needed help to get into their houses. Touching a pax was sin numero uno, and watching patients crawl to their doorsteps was a total bummer.
I picked up the pax. She was hammered and demanded Drake. When I dropped her eight minutes later, she dropped herself. She face-planted into the steps of the next party. There’s a lot of falling in my line of work. I probably should’ve hung it up for the night right there. I needed to meet Emma at the gyno to find out the sex of our baby. I was already in the doghouse for not building the crib she ordered off Amazon, so I couldn’t be late. Just one more fare.
$8.54. 8.3 mile trip.
Accept. As I pulled up to the pickup point, the hair on my arm crackled upright. I knew who my pax was before he got in.
He slid into the backseat. I’d say he appeared if that didn’t sound crazy. I met his black eyes in the rearview. He was riding under a new user name: Cyrus. He didn’t make a sound the entire ride, and when we got to the destination, he didn’t move. Neither did I. I was too scared.
“This is uh…” I cleared my throat. That’ll show him. “This is you.”
No movement. I fumbled with the handle of an umbrella underneath my seat. What I was going to do with a yellow polka dot umbrella wasn’t apparent, but it was time to make a move. I spun around, and there he was, as crystal clear as Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men.
He was me.
The same thick eyebrows, the hairline that receded at the same angle. His stubble was missing in the same spot that would connect mustache to beard on the right side of a more masculine mouth. He kept staring. Not at me, but through me, as if seeing my soul, my weakness. I was determined to prove him wrong.
“G—g—get out.”
A half-smile parted the right side of his mouth, and I regretted my demand. So I doubled down.
“Get out of my car!”
To the most assertive I’d ever been, he didn’t blink. I wondered if he’d ever blinked. A shiver rolled up my spine. I swung open the door and launched into the rain. I didn’t even open my polka dot umbrella. I’m a man. I swung around to the passenger side. Now or never, DO IT NOW! I flung open the door!
But he was gone.
I’m not sure how long I stood in the rain, mouth gaped, when my cell buzzed. I pressed the cell to my ear. “We’re having twins,” Emma’s voice was terse with anger. “Thanks for showing up.”
And then she hung up.
PART 2 coming Sunday